Kitchen classics

Wednesday

Jan 10, 2007 at 6:00 AM

By Julia Moskin THE NEW YORK TIMES

When Joan Hotson turned 65, she says, each of her five daughters began angling to inherit The Book.

“They knew it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, but they were quite determined,” Hotson said. The object of their interest was a long-out-of-print cookbook, “Pillsbury’s Best 1000 Recipes: Best of the Bake-Off Collection,” published in 1959. Hotson received her copy, including recipes for Chocolate Pixie Cookies and Orange Kiss-Me Cake, as a wedding present in 1962.

“There are very few recipes in that book I haven’t made, and all my girls make their Christmas cookies from it,” said Hotson, who lives in Victoria, British Columbia. “The flavors are very distinctive.”

Hotson said she has trouble finding recipes for baking from scratch. “It seems like they all begin, ‘Take one box white cake mix,’ ” she said.

For 10 years, Hotson haunted secondhand-book stores and contemplated a massive photocopying project. Then the Internet saved her: She found five copies at oldcookbooks.com.

“That 1959 book is the one people really want,” said Patricia Edwards, who runs the Web site with her husband, Peter Peckham, and stocks thousands of cookbooks in a warehouse in Reno, Nev. “It was the first time the company did a collection, even though the competition began in 1949. I can’t keep it in stock.”

Like canned peaches and Crisco, a few out-of-print cookbooks have stayed in demand long after the food experts have decreed them dated. They may not have the canonical status of works by Julia Child, Marcella Hazan and other authorities, but over time these books have earned a cult following. Among all the cookbooks published, these few have remained useful enough, tasty enough or beloved enough that cooks still bypass the megastore to track them down.

“New and revised are not always a good thing,” said Bonnie Slotnick, a cookbook dealer (bonnieslotnickcookbooks.com) in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. “Cooks don’t necessarily want the newfangled or low-fat versions that publishers think they do.”

Most often, she says, people are looking for one of the “mother books,” big, popular cookbooks from the first half of the 20th century that were also comprehensive guides to everything from training servants to raising children, like the Woman’s Home Companion books, the Boston Cooking-School books (predecessors of the Fannie Farmer series), the encyclopedic works of Meta Given and the American Woman’s Cookbook.

“‘The Joy of Cooking’ was far from the only book of its kind,” Edwards said. “And people want the one they grew up with.”

For lovers of old cookbooks — or of specific recipes, like pear brickle or steaks Annette — satisfying such a quest has never been easier. During the early years of the Internet, doomsayers predicted that it would kill off cookbooks altogether by giving cooks free access to millions of recipes that were once confined to magazines, cookbooks, card boxes and libraries.

But the Internet has also given anyone with a keyboard a good shot at tracking down a book with a grandmother’s particular recipe for beef stew or Ensalada de Noche Buena, a traditional Christmas Eve dish of diced fruit and jicama sprinkled with peanuts and pomegranate seeds served in many parts of Mexico. (Elena Zelayeta, a California restaurateur who wrote several of the first Mexican cookbooks for a popular American audience, published a recipe in “Elena’s Fiesta Recipes” in 1961.)

“The trade in old cookbooks used to be more for collectors,” said Frank Daniels, author of “Collector’s Guide to Cookbooks.” “Now everyone has access to all the book dealers in every town, and because of that, prices have come way down.”

As a result, dealers say, there is a lively new trade in out-of-print cookbooks that is driven not by the meteoric careers of chefs or the research needs of libraries, but mostly by people with an attachment, often irrational and sentimental, to a particular book or recipe.

“I get a lot of calls from people who know only that the book they want had a blue cover, or they remember that there was buttermilk in the gingerbread recipe” Slotnick said. “The Internet still can’t answer all those questions.”

Cooks from different parts of the country have regional allegiances: Books by Helen Corbitt, who helped define upscale Texas cooking as culinary director of Neiman Marcus in the 1950s and 1960s, are still popular there. Chicago cooks collect Antoinette Pope, who ran the Pope School of Fancy Cookery there from the 1930s to the 1960s. “I found a copy for one customer who had just buried her mother’s copy in the casket with her,” Slotnick said.

And then, she said, there are the most-wanted books that are so rare that they are virtually nonexistent.

“I have never seen one,” Slotnick said, “but I have customers who would give their lives for a copy of ‘Cooking For You Alone’ by Johnny Mathis.”

At bookfinder.com, the perennial best-selling cookbook is “A Treasury of Great Recipes,” first published in 1965 by Vincent and Mary Price (yes, that Vincent Price). It’s a padded, imitation leather, gilt-stamped collection of luxurious recipes from the world’s past pleasure palaces, most of them long gone — like chicken in champagne sauce from Le Pavillon in Manhattan, which closed in 1972.

For Tom Dawson, a retired hotel executive who lives in Pacific Palisades, Calif., it was a powerful food memory sparked by the sight of beef bones going to waste at a local butcher that inspired him to take to the Web.

“I remembered eating these hot, crusty, big beef bones at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in the 1970s,” he said. The hotel’s Bull & Bear restaurant no longer serves the dish, but Dawson tracked down a copy of the original “Waldorf-Astoria Cookbook” from 1964 that included the recipe, for Deviled Roast-Beef Bones, with portion recommendations. “One bone for a lady, two for a man,” he said. “Of course, my wife and I each eat three when I make them. “

“There is certainly a brisk trade in nostalgia,” said Nach Waxman, owner of the Upper East Side Manhattan cookbook store Kitchen Arts and Letters, which also operates a book-search service. “People who went to Lyon to eat at La Pyramide under Fernand Point are still trying to get their hands on copies of ‘Ma Gastronomie.”‘

Point, the most famous French chef in America in his day, died in 1955; the book was compiled and published by his wife after his death. The book has a following among young chefs but also, Waxman said, among older diners who made the pilgrimage; at any given moment he has more than 100 unfilled requests for it.